Taking Your Prospect List From The 20th to the 21st Century: Merging With Social Media

At a meeting a few weeks ago, a New York City business group was discussing having an event focused on web prospecting. The event would focus on helping businesses know how to find prospective customers online and using the resources of the New York City library.
I know many of you, especially in certain industries, do cold calling. You find prospective customers through online databases, and develop the database by creating a customized profile of the business you are looking for.
Maybe you use Hoovers (part of D&B), Jigsaw, SalesGenie or some other tool. While these tools are powerful and important, what they are missing is the ability to connect these prospective leads to social media databases, such as LinkedIn.
Having a prospect list, sans social-media, is ok. But being able to have the rich additional information that can be produced by combining a traditionally compiled prospect list with attributes from social media networks is powerful.Hoover’s, Inc. recently announced that it has added LinkedIn contact data to its subscriber site. This new addition provides seamless integration between Hoover’s information on 31 million companies and 37 million people with LinkedIn’s professional network of business contacts.
“We realize, especially in this economy, that closing a sale or business deal can be heavily reliant on finding and using the right connections within your professional network,” said Peter Poulin, Hoover’s executive vice president of marketing and business development. “This LinkedIn integration builds upon our commitment to providing customers with the best ways to discover how to connect to the companies and business decision makers on our site.”
While I’m on the subject of LinkedIn, are YOU getting all you can from these tools, including Plaxo, Facebook and Twitter.?